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SPEECH 



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CHARLES CrBURLEIGH 



AT THE 



ANNUAL MEETING 



OF THE 



MASSACHUSETTS A, S. SOCIETY. 

Friday, January 28, 1859. 



' For us, and for our children, the vow which we have given 
For Freedom and Humanity is registered in heaven : — 
Ko slave-hunt in our borders— no pirate on our strand — 
No fetter in the Bay State— no ."lave upon our land ! ' 

Whittier. 



BOSTON: 

PUBLISHED BY THE MASS. A. 8. SOCIETT. 
1859. 




SPEECH. 



Mr. President, — The subject which is presented 
to us in this resolution,* I am glad to know, is one 
claiming no small share of attention at the present 
time, throughout the Commonwealth ; and, indeed, 
not in this Commonwealth alone. We have had, as 
we were told j'esterda}', an example set before us in 
a neighboring State, in relation to this matter, wor- 
thy to be imitated by those who believe in the fun- 
damental principles embodied in the Massachusetts 
Constitution, and in the American Declaration of In- 
dependence. 



* Resolved, That, whether the people of Massachu- 
setts can do anything to abolish slavery in the South 
or not, they can forbid, and are imperatively bound 
by the highest moral considerations to forbid, the 
hunting of fugitive slaves in this Commonwealth, and 
to decree the immediate emancipation of all such as 
soon as they touch our soil ; they can and ought to 
cease from all slaveholding relations with the South ; 
and therefore they can and ought, in common with 
the people of every other free State, to withdraw 
from a government which, both by practice and in- 
tention, is a grand conspiracy against justice, and a 
powerful bulwark of the slave system. 



4 

I have, in my going up and down in the land, very 
often had occasion to meet those who objected to 
what they called the sweeping condemnation passed 
by Abolitionists on the people of the Commonwealth, 
and especially on the political parties of the North, 
by reason of their complicity with slaveholding. I 
have been told — ' We are as much opposed to slavery 
as you are ; we do not mean to do any thing to give 
strength to the oppressor's arm ; and we do not feel 
that the severe censures passed upon us are deserved.' 
I have replied by asking them — ' Are you ready to do 
this thing r — You say that you cannot reach slavery 
in Carolina and Virginia, and must not be condemned 
because you do not assail it there : are you ready to 
purify the soil of the Old Bay State from the contam- 
ination of slavery r Are you ready to say, that when- 
ever a man sets his foot upon the soil of the Com- 
monwealth, he shall be recognized as a man, and shall 
be treated as a man r ' And I have not always found 
them ready to say yes to this inquiry. If, in gen- 
eral terms, at the first propounding thereof, they 
would say yes, yet upon a closer cross-examination, 
upon a more minute specification of the measures 
necessary to attain the general object, they would 
often shrink from replying in the affirmative— some- 
times assigning one reason, sometimes another, the 
whole, however, summed up in this — ' The Union and 
the Constitution.' We cannot say to the South, you 
shall no longer claim your runaways upon the soil 
of Massachusetts— you shall no longer blot oat the 
blooJ-bt lined footprints of Concord and Lexington 
with the loul tread of the kidnapper and slave-hun 



ter — we cannot say this to the South, because the 
Constitution guarantees to the South the right to 
hunt runaways all over the North ; to seize them 
wherever they shall be found, and to drag them back 
to slavery from the very door of the sanctuary of 
liberty they may have endeavored to find shelter in. 
No matter that we have proclaimed to the nations, 
as a self-evident truth, the equal, inalienable rights 
of all men ; no matter that we are preaching from a 
thousand pulpits the doctrine of human brotherhood — 
that God, who made the world, hath of one blood 
made all nations to dwell on the face of the earth ; no 
matter that our fathers stood for the defence of those 
principles in the day of trial and danger, perilling 
their lives on the high places of the field ; no matter 
that they baptized their infant liberty with blood, on 
the spot where stands yonder granite column, telling 
of the deeds that were done for impartial freedom ; 
no matter that the voice of musketry and artillery, 
from the banks of Concord river and the Common of 
Lexington, spoke out defiant words for justice and 
humanity, in the very face of the tyrant's displeasure 
and menace ; — all that is nothing, because, at a later 
dav, the fathers consented to erase these glorious 
wQa"ds of their earlier history, that they might find 
room upon the page, made blank by the erasure, to 
write ♦ a covenant with death and an agreement with 
hell ' — to write a compact binding them to give the 
lie to the glorious declaration of a previous day, 
binding them to bring upon their own souls that 
very stain of complicity with tyranny which they 
deemed so dark a spot upon the character of their 



6 

mother land and its government. AVe cannot, then, 
they tell us, be just, we cannot be true to the princi- 
ples which our fathers announced in their declara- 
tion, we cannot be humane and Christian. There is 
the Gospel of Jesus, with, the glorious example of the 
Good Samaritan, bending over the sufferer by the 
wayside, at the risk of no matter what peril to his 
own person or damage to his own interest, — with its 
high lessons of self-denial, self-sacrifice, and generous 
deeds of benevolence, — with its solemn injunction to 
feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and take in the 
houseless wanderer, and recognize, in every poor and 
suffering child of humanity, only the disguised 
form, but none the less real form, of Him who was 
• the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express 
image of his person'; of Him who, speaking now 
through poverty-wasted lips and now with the tongue 
of the sable bondman, says, ♦ Inasmuch as ye have done 
deeds of kindness unto one of the least of these my 
brethren, 5'c have done them unto me.' We know it 
is there ; we read it every morning ; we hear it everj' 
Sunday from our pulpits ; we are aware that the in- 
junction stands there, that the example is recorded 
there, that its glorious spirit is diffused all through 
that blessed Gospel ; and we, in the presence of God, 
angels and men, have entered into a solemn covenant 
that we will be true to that Gospel, that we will take 
it as the man of our counsel, as the rule of our life, 
as the law of our spiritual existence and action. Yet, 
because our fathers made a bargain, to secure certain 
political advantages, that they would repudiate this 
Gospel when its application demanded humanity to 



the bondman, justice to the oppressed, therefore will 
we be inhuman to the bondman, unjust to the op- 
pressed ; therefore will we trample our solemn cove- 
nant with God, made in the presence of God, angels 
and men, under our feet; and that we may be true 
to a man-made Constitution, all black with iniquity 
and bloody with crime, we will be false to the most 
sacred obligations of humanity and Christianity. 

I do not say that men answer me in these words. 
I am translating their answer out of the dialect of 
wily politicians and cunning sophists, into plain lan- 
guage, which the common people can understand. 
You and I know that my translation is a faithful one, 
lacking, it may be, the force which it would be de- 
sirable to impart to it, because the speech of man has 
no symbols to match the ideas and the facts with which 
we have to deal on this occasion. 

Well, then, I meet the question as it is propounded. 
Has the Commonwealth of Massachusetts a right to 
refuse protection to the bondman, to refuse a recogni- 
tion of his manhood, to refuse to repel the aggressions 
of the Slave Power, and the intrusion of the kidnap- 
per within her borders ? Has Massachusetts a right 
to sell conscience, and humanity, and God, for so 
poor a mess of pottage as is brought to her in the 
leaky vessel of the American Union, serving only, as 
it bubbles from the cauldron, hell-heated, to scald 
her own tongue with the dripping stream, and failing 
to satisfy her thirsting lip with the disappointing 
draught? (Loud applause.) 

I say that Massachusetts has no such right; and I 
say it, conceding, for the present moment, that the 



8 

compact is, in letter and spirit, what it is assumed to 
be ; because, assuming it to be such, it is so grossly 
and monstrously immoral, so flagrantly at variance 
■with the principles acknowledged by the Common- 
wealth as self-evidently true, such an outrage upon 
humanity and decency, that it cannot be a binding 
compact. Xo man can bind himself, no community 
of men can bind itself, by no matter what bargains, to 
do what God forbids, to do what conscience clearly 
and emphatically condemns. You tell me it is legal, 
this claim of the slaveholder ; you tell me it is con- 
stitutional, this right which he arrogates to himself to 
turn men into brutes by the help of the government. 
I tell you I do not care for your terms ' legal,' and 
♦ constitutional.' I might stand here, and argue 
whether it is, in any just sense of the term, < legal ' ; 
and if you quote Kent and Story, Marshall and Ta- 
ney, I might, on the other hand, quote Blackstone, 
Coke and Hooker ; and I might ask you, if legal 
authority is to stand, whether that legal authority 
which stands afar from the overshadowing influences 
of the slave system, is less likely to be aflected by 
those evil influences, or that authority which, standing 
in the very midst of this shadow, is dimmed and be- 
wildered by it. But, without stopping to inquire as to 
the fitness of the application of the term ' legal ' to 
this claim of the slaveholder, it is enough for me to be 
able to apply to it the epithets immoral, infamoust 
atrocious. I say to a citizen of Massachusetts, Do 
you not believe that the slave is a man, and your 
brother r — and few are the citizens of Massachusetts 
so hardy as to answer, No ! They tell us that even 



the Boston Courier is beginning to claim for itself a 
due deference to the manhood of the black man ; and 
if the Boston Cotw/er has found out that it is expedi- 
ent to say this, you may depend upon it that the 
Boston Courier knows that Massachusetts believes it 
is right ; and if the Boston Courier believes it is right, 
who will face the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 
with the imputation upon its character, that it doubts 
the rectitude of what even the Boston Courier feels to 
be right r You admit, then, that the slave is a man, 
and your brother ; you admit he has the same esential 
and inalienable rights that you have. You would 
not skulk away into Roger B. Taney's poor hiding- 
place, and pretend that when the Constitution was 
made, the public sentiment of the civilized world re- 
garded the black man as 'having no rights which the 
white man is bound to respect.' But even if that lie 
were a truth, it would not help the case at all, for 
your obligation dates back to a period older than your 
Constitution ; and a part of the indictment which is 
read against you, and to which you must plead in 
Heaven's court, if not on earth, is that you consent 
to a Constitution which accepted as its basis, and 
incorporated into its structure, that horrible blasphemy 
against God, and that insult to man, that anj- child of 
the Universal Father is destitute of rights worthy of the 
recognition of every other child of that Father. I ask 
you, assuming that 3'our Constitution was based upon 
this principle of essential wickedness, "What right had 
your fathers to accept that Constitution as the supreme 
law of the land r What right have you, now that 
your fathers have so accepted it, and transmitted to 



10 

you the tradition of allegiance to it, to accept that 
tradition, and ratify the contract which has thus been 
made with the powers of darkness ? That is the ques- 
tion which the people of the Commonwealth of Mas- 
sachusetts must answer. They may try to evade it to- 
day ; they may try to dodge it to-morrow ; they 
may trj'Ho silence it with the previous question, or a 
motion to indefinite!}' postpone in the State House ; 
they may try to slur it over in the platform of the. po- 
litical campaign approaching ; they may try to avoid 
it in the discussions of the political press ; they may 
even put^it out of sight in the homilies of the pulpit 
and the religious newspapers — but the question must 
be answered ! It has been written out in the sight of 
men, it has been spoken in the ears of men, and there 
is no escaping it after that. The murderer who, med- 
itating on his deed of blood, thought that, 

' If it -were done when 'tis clone, then 'twere avcII 
It were done quickly,' 

could as easily wash out the memory of that day, 
and make the event to 'trammel up its consequence' 
— could as easily close the eyes of that inner vision, 
which he shared not with anj- who shared not his 
consciousness of guilt, against the spectre that crowd- 
ed him from his stool, and usurped his place at tlie 
banquet — as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 
blind her eyes to this question, which is glaring out 
upon her from the skies tliat hang the Nortli Star out 
to guide the fugitive in his flight, and speaks to her 
in the very murmur of the forest, wliieh licars only, 
besides that murmur, the tread of the bondn.an 
on his way to Canada. The question must be met, 



11 

then, has Massachusetts a right to abide by an un- 
hallowed compact ? And deep down in the heart of 
Massachusetts, if not very loxid and audible to the 
outward ear, yet clearly, distinctly, in tones which 
imperatively demand audience, the answer to this 
question has already formed itself into sj'llables which 
will scorch the soul that refuses to heed them. 
("Loud applause.) Massachusetts has no right ! It is 
the common sense of universal humanity, it is the doc- 
trine of religion and morality, it is the principle of law 
itself, which forbids obedience to an immoral injunction, 
compliance with the terms of an immoral compact. If 
I ask the men of Massachusetts, Will you ratify a 
bargain made by your predecessors to sanctify murder 
with the warrant of statute law and judicial precedent ? 
— the men of Massachusetts will probably look at me 
with mingled astonishment and indignation, hesitating 
between the latter emotion for the insult offered, and 
the former that any man should dare to offer such an 
insult. And yet, if you are set to institute a careful 
comparison between murder and the chattelization of 
manhood — if, against the single atrocity of the one 
crime, you balance the complex and innumerable atro- 
cities of the other, who is there of you that is willing 
to avow his belief that it is less immoral, less criminal, 
to sanction slaveholding, than it is to sanction mur- 
der ? If any, for him I have this question : Bring the 
matter home to yourself, in such form as will set it 
closest to your most central consciousness, whether it 
be in imagining that you are to be the victim of the 
one or the other crime, or in imagining that some ob- 
ject of your tenderest affection is to be that victim. 



12 

Fancy to yourself, for a moment, the alternative pre- 
sented, whether the wife whom you love, whether the 
daughter now blushing into beautiful womanhood, 
around whom cluster jour strongest affections, and 
upon whom rests a father's purest pride, shall fall 
dead at your feet, and to-morrow be laid away in the 
safe sanctuary of the grave, with the sheltering clods 
of the valley above her form, or whether she shall be 
grasped by the kidnapper and torn from your very 
presence, to be exposed for sale on the auction stand 
of the human flesh market, and be struck off to him 
who will bid the largest sum of filthy gold for the 
privilege of desecrating that sanctuary of the Holy 
Ghost, polluting that dwelling-place of the social and 
domestic affections, and turning that most beautiful spe- 
cimen of God's handiwoak, the form of fair humanity, 
into the abode of impurity, and the scene of deepest 
degradation. Picture to yourself the presentation of 
that alternative, and then anticipate your own answer 
to my question; and in that answer hear your judgment 
of the comparative guilt of him w-ho strikes the mer- 
ciful blow of murder, and him who binds around his 
victim the poisonous coil of the slave's chair, blister- 
ing body and spirit together at every point of contact, 
festering to the core of the soul's inmost being with a 
corruption foul.'as essential impurity itself, and mors 
terrible to bear than the fires of unending perdi- 
tion. You have answered the question long before I 
have done asking it, and have been reproving me in 
your souls for lingering in my tardy and halting speech 
behind the unerring and lightning-like readiness of 
your response. Well, then, you have answered the 



13 

question, whether Massachusetts has any right to give 
back the runa-\vay slave to his master; for you know 
that all these sophistical distinctions w^hich our sel- 
fishness and pride sometimes — with diabolical malice| 
and more than diabolical ingenuity — whisper in our 
ears, you know that these are of no avail before the 
searching eye which looks to the very motive of our act, 
and sees that we are false to the convictions of our own 
souls when we seek the justification for our wrong in 
the color of its victim. 

Grant, if you will, that the fugitive bondman com- 
ing from Carolina or Virginia belongs to an inferior 
race. I will not stop to argue that question now ; 
but the inquiry might very well arise, why it is that 
this haughty Saxon race, so conscious of its own su- 
periority, is so afraid to trust a rival race to compete 
with it on equal terms for the world's prizes? Con- 
cede that it is an inferior race with which we have to 
deal,— what then ? Is that inferiority the justification 
for robbing it of that precious boon which the Father 
has bestowed upon it? Or, in other words, do you 
justify plunder by the poverty of its victim r Do you 
say that because the poor man has but one small ewe 
lamb, brought up in his bosom, while you have many 
flocks and herds spread over your rich estate, you may 
therefore feed your guests witli the flesh of his lamb, 
and dread no coming of God's steni prophet on the 
morrow to make you condemn yourself with your 
own lips, and ratify the condemnation with the 
words — * Thou art the man !' You know it is no jus- 
tification. The slave comes here, and asks for protec- 
tion. You know you owe it to him. Tell me you did 



14 

not bargain it in the Constitution — what then r Why 
didn't you bargain it in the Constitution, and what 
right had you to refuse to bargain it to him in the 
Constitution ? When a man comes from a distant 
land to ours, and asks to be sheltered under the roof 
of our ' asylum for the oppressed of all nations,' we bid 
liim welcome, come from what quarter he may. Even 
Cass was ready to welcome Garibaldi from the wars 
of freedom in Italy, and the nation rises up with loud 
acclaim to greet the arrival of the Hungarian patriot ; 
yes, and even far abroad in the harbor of Smyrna, far 
as the nation can reach out the arm of its power, it 
protects the refugee who has announced his purpose 
to become a citizen of our country. So there is the 
nation's own answer to the question of its moral obli- 
gation. 

Now, have you any right to barter away the rights 
of your fellow-men, and can you barter away your 
own obligation ? E-emember, that when you make a 
bargain that you will not protect Martin Kozta in the 
harbor of Smyrna, that you will not shield Kossuth 
from the myrmidons of Austria seeking him in the 
streets of Boston, that you will not shelter Caribaldi 
from the ministers of the Pope, you have not merely 
attempted to divest yourselves of a moral obligation ; 
you have attempted to sell away that which does not 
belong to you — another man's rights. My right to 
be protected here upon the soil of Massachusetts is a 
right wliich God gave me, and not the Commonwealth 
of Massachusetts. Suppose that, before the Pilgrims 
landed from the Mayflower upon Plymouth rock, 



15 

and gave occasion for the lifting up of that high 
strain of the English poet — 

♦ What sought they thus afar? 

Bright jewels of the mine, 
The wealth of seas, the spoils of war? 

They sought a Faith's pure shrine, 
Aye, call it holy ground, 

The spot where first they trod ; 
They have left unstained what here they found, 

Freedom to Avorship God' — 

suppose that, before that event, when this continent 
as yet a -wilderness, was untrodden by the white 
man's foot — go back, if you will, to a still earlier 
period, before the red man had come here to the 
forests where he has chased his game, and suppose 
that some wanderer from a civilized land had been 
drifted to these shores by adverse gales, and had met 
here, borne unwillingly from some other region of the 
civilized world, one like himself, a solitary refugee 
from the fury of the tempest; what were their obliga- 
tions ? Not constitutional — for they had made no 
Constitution ; not legal — for they had enacted no 
law; not arising from any compact or covenant — for 
they had entered into none. What were their mutual 
obligations? When God wrote upon the soul of man 
the law of his social nature, put into him the power to 
feel for and with his suffering and imperilled fellows, 
then he wrote the mandate commanding him to help 
the suffering and the endangered. Now, can you re- 
peal that Constitution of God by any of your man- 
made compacts ? Can you rob that solitary wanderer, 
from England we will say, of the right to the 
protection of his fellow-wanderer from France or 



16 

Germany, by making; a bargain that it shall not be 
given ? I owe you a debt ; can I cancel that debt by 
simply writing under the obligation which attests it, 
that I shall not recognize it henceforward ? Certainly 
not. Until, then, you can cancel the obligation of 
simple humanity to simple humanity, the •obligation 
of kindness and mutual benefit and protection, you 
cannot get any right whereon to base your constitu- 
tional compact to give up the runaway slave to his 
ma^nter. (Applause.) You come together, not two 
individuals, drifting hither from opposite regions of 
the earth, but multiplied to twenty millions, and yet 
every one under this same obligation which God had 
fixed upon the first individual man who set foot upon 
these shores ; — you come together, eacli bound by that 
divine law, and can you any more shake it off by the 
multitude of your concurrences than could the 
individual effort of the single solitary wanderer ? If a 
house is built of blocks of granite, it is a granite house, 
no matter wliat incantations are muttered over it, no 
matter what inscriptions you engrave upon its front. 
Whatever is inherent in the individual constituents 
of the collective mass, is inherent in the mass itself; 
and therefore the obligation to protect every man 
who sets his foot upon your soil, is as perfect when 
you have formed a Union and Constitution, as it was 
when one man by the side of another stood in need of 
help, when one man by the side of another had power 
to help. You can never escape from that obligation. 
What is the making of a government ? Simply 
tJiis : the construction of a machine more effectively 
to do that work, the doing of which was every man 's 



17 

duty before the government was made. Suppose I 
owe a man an obligation to reap his harvest upon the 
prairies of Illinois, and when I go to look at it, I find 
there is an immense range of territory covered by the 
grain, and I say—' Here is a mighty obligation ; what 
shall I do ? I can never reap down that field with the 
old sickle my grandfather used on the hills of New 
England ; I can never lay that harvest even in the 
swath with the cradle I used in my early manhood ; 
I must devise some other means to accomplish it.' So 
I sit down, and, tasking my Yankee ingenuity to the 
utmost, I build in the recesses of my mind a reaping 
machine, and then I drag that reaping machine out 
of the subtle chambers of the brain, and incarnate it iu 
wood and iron, and there it stands palpable and prac- 
tical before me. Now I have released myself, for- 
sooth, say our learned statesmen snd profound jurists, 
from my obligation ; because I have made a machine 
that can do in one day what would have taken me six 
months to accomplish ! Do j'ou believe that ? No ; 
the making of the machine is to be justified by the use 
to which it is put ; and that use is the fulfilment of 
my obligation. Government is m.ade to protect the 
rights of the. governed. That is not, I think, one of 
the modern, ultra, radical, anti-slavery, Garrisonian 
doctrine. I think we read it in a document once 
regarded of some authority, in this country, at least — 
that the purpose of the institution of government is 
to protect the rights of the governed. Now, I ask 
you, is the slave one of your governed When he comes 
to Massachusetts, or not ? If not, then you have no 
right to govern him, but must leave him to go and 



18 

come when and where he pleases. If he is, then you 
have bound yourselves to protect him by your govern- 
ment, in the simple fast that you have made a govern- 
ment. You have only transferred to it, as the instru- 
ment of your action, the obligation which already 
rested upon you, by virtue of God's decree, written 
in your very souls. 

That, then, is our answer to those who talk to us 
about the Constitution. We contend that inasmuch 
as slaveholding is the violation of all human rights, 
that inasmuch as the refugee has a right to leave it 
behind him, and seek freedom elsewhere, if he cannot 
find it at home, and inasmuch as he has come to Mas- 
sachusetts, and is within the reach of her protection, 
he has acquired thereby a right to that protection, and 
we cannot divest ourselves of the obligation to give it 
to him. 

But then, they tell us, the Constitution, never- 
theless. What, I ask, is the relative authority of a 
Constitution that man makes, and a Constitution that 
God makes? W^hat is the relative authority of an ab- 
solute moral obligation, and a mere conventional ob- 
ligation ? One would think there need be no labored 
answer to questions like these ; and there would not 
be. If men had not suffered their minds to be befogged 
by the false teachings of politicians and priests. When 
Boston pulpits can enunciate the impious and blas- 
phemous do( trine that we must obey the statutes en- 
acted by a constitutional Legislature, whether wise or 
unwise, just or unjust, and when the doctrine that 
there is any Higher Law is repudiated by political 
parties and scouted by i)olitical leaders, and denounc- 



19 

ed as heresy to be punished by political death, it be- 
comes necessary for us to teach the very rudiments of 
political morality, it becomes necessary for us to tell 
anew truths so plain that we might almost tremble in 
the utterance, as insulting the understanding and 
moral sense which we address ; but so it is. 

Now I ask — because I do not mean to go at length 
into this argument — but one question : What is, 
after all, the source of your obligation to obey the 
law of the land ? Why, you say, because the consti- 
tuted Legislature has enacted it. But that only puts 
the question one step further off. What is the source 
of your obligation to recognize the authority of the 
constituted Legislature of the land ? In other words, 
what is the source of yovir obligation to obey an enact- 
ment because it is a legislative enactment ? Oh, you 
will tell me, it is your mo7-al duty. The instant 
you make use of that Avord duty, you make your ap- 
peal to somewhat within me that takes hold of my 
moral sense, which takes cognizance of duty ; and ray 
inquiry is, whether I am bound to obey the dictates 
of my moral sense or not. If I am not, then no mat- 
ter how you make it clear that my moral sense re- 
quires it, I sweep away the statute and the moral sense 
together, and tell you it does not please me to obey 
either. But if, to avoid that conclusion, you say, I 
am bound to obey the dictates of my m.cral sense, 
then I ask 5'ou, what must I do with your statute 
when that conflicts with my moral sense r — and you 

have already answered me, in assuming that I am 
bound to obe)-- my ov»'n conscientious conviction. Thus 
it is, you see, that to deny my right or obligation to 



20 

obey my own conscientious convictions, is virtually to 
strike at the very foundation of allegiance to your 
government. 

But I pass on to another consideration. The Com- 
mon"v\'ealth of Massachusetts is to be called on, 
throvigh its Legislature, this winter, to enact that no 
slave shall be taken back to bondage from its juris- 
diction. I can easily suppose that the objection will 
be urged there which we hear elsewhere — ' the Con- 
stitution and the Union ! ' I have shoAvn that the 
Constitution, whereinsoever it conflicts with the 
moral law, is not and cannot be binding ; that it 
is not only our right but our duty to trample upon it ; 
but I have this further reason, that the party in in- 
terest against the claims of justice and humanity has 
already forfeited even its apparent claim, upon the 
ground of the compact of the Constitution. When- 
ever men make bargains, they make them with the 
understanding of mutuality — there is not only a ben- 
efit, but an obligation on both sides of the bargain. 
If I say to you, This farm shall pass into your pos- 
session for so much money to pass into mine, and you 
give me your nole of hand and receive the deed, 
when the time comes for the jjayment of the note of 
hand, if you refuse to pay it, I am under no obliga- 
tion any longer to recognize your right to the pro- 
perty, but have a right to use such means as will be ef- 
fectual to bring that property back into my posses- 
sion ; or, if the note is to be paid before the deed is 
given, I have a right to refuse the deed. (Applause.) 
You all understand the principle well enough, and I 
think you already know enough of our relations to 



21 

the Slave Power to see the application of that prin- 
ciple in the ease before us. The bargain, we are 
told, was this ; that for certain considerations, we of 
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will give up to 
the slaveholder his fugitive from slavery. Well, so the 
bond, if it do not exactly so read, has been, by common 
consent, interpreted. But, in the first place, the bar- 
gain rested upon these considerations — that, whatever 
rights were guaranteed to us in the Constitution, we 
shall be permitted to enjoy without molestation; and, 
second, (if not expressed, yet necessarily implied in 
the absence of any terms extending the obligations 
further,) that we should not be obliged to surrender 
slaves carried from any part of the earth that was 
not covered by the terms of the compact. Now, in 
both of these particulars, the Slave Power has vio- 
lated the terms of its c(mipact, and has thus released 
us from our obligation, if it were possible that a com- 
pact so immoral could impose any obligation at the 
beginning. The slaveholders have not been true to 
the terms of the bargain we made. The Constitution 
has guaranteed to us the privileges and immunities 
of citizenship, go where we will within the compass 
of this Union. If I go to Carolina, I am a citizen of 
the United States, and, by virtue of my citizenship, 
I have a right to free speech and a free press, and to 
use rny moral and religious influence in favor of 
•whatever my moral and religious nature tells me I 
ought to endeavor to promote. I have a right, then — 
just as good a right in Carolina as in Massachusetts — 
to assail slavery with all the weapons of the moral 
armory ; I have a right to call upon the people of the 



22 

South, in the name of justice and Christianitv, in the 
name of humanity, in the name of sound policy, in 
the name of good economy, to abolish the slave sys- 
tem ; I have a right to say that it is unjust, anti- 
Christian and inhuman, and that it is emphatically 
uneconomical. I have a right to show its waste of 
the energies of the people, its waste of the resources 
of national wealth, its violation of the essential rights 
of human nature, its opposition to the laws of God and 
the teachings of Christ. Can I do it? Will Carolina 
let me do it : I go there with the Constitution spread 
all oyer me as my shield of pi'otection, I go there with 
my legal rights piled up before me as an impregna- 
ble fortress of defence, and one breath dissolves it 
into nothing, and melts the parcliment into thin 
particles of impalpable vapor. "SVhcre is my con- 
stitutional protection, if I dare to speak for humanity, 
for truth, for justice to tnc enslaved? If 1 dare to 
undertake the application of Christianity to the daily life 
of Carolina, if I even date to quote • Poor Richard's Al- 
manac,' in application to the wasteful and desolating 
system of slavery, I do it at the peril of my life ; and 
the very best fate I can hope is the privilege of going 
into instant banishment from the territory' of the sov- 
ereign empire of Carolina. Well, I come home to 
Massachusetts, and the next day,— having been ban- 
ished by Carolina from her soil, in defiance of the terms 
of the compact, — I must turn round and catch An- 
thony Burns, and tying him hands and feet, hurry 
him back into Carolina bondage ! Even waiving the 
question of the original immorality of the compact, 
am I bound, having been robbed of the benefits that 



23 

were to accrue to me, still to bear all the burdens that 
were imposed upon me ? I tell you, no. 

I might go on and recite one particular alter another 
in which the Constitution has been violated by the 
Slave Power, not under the inilaence of passion, not 
in moments of high excitement, but deliberately, sys- 
tematically, on a preconcerted plan, and with an 
unanimity throughout the slave States, so complete 
as to leave no possible doubt of their entire harmony 
of sympathy and feeling, and concert of purpose and 
action. 

Now, who will tell me, in the face of these unde- 
niable facts, that might be piled one upon another — 
like Pelion upon Ossa, until the whole land should 
be shadowed by darkness which they would cast 
over it, — who will tell me that, nevertheless, we are 
bound to abide by the terms of the Constitution ? 

Eut, as I said, the Constitution carries with it ano- 
ther obligation on the part of the pro-slavery party, 
and that is, not to attempt to stretch its application 
beyond the limits originally understood. Yet the 
Slave Power has done that. It has carried to Texas 
what was meant only for the Atlantic States ; it has 
carried over to the territory of Louisiana, and the States 
carved and to be carved out of it, and it is trying to 
carry to Cuba, and Nicaragua, and Sonora, and I 
knov/ not how many other provinces and islands of 
continent and sea, that obligation which was original- 
ly understood as limited within definite boundaries. 
Now it has no definite boundaries. The domain of 
slavery is bounded only by the possibility of slavery- 
extension. If you know where that limit is, then 



24 

you can tell me what is the limit to which the Slave 
Power would carry the obligation to give back runa- 
way slaves, and to do whatever other pro-slavery work 
it sees tit to exact from us. I deny the competency 
of one of the parties to a compact to extend the ap- 
plication of its terms in this manner. But if you tell 
rac that it is not extended simply by the action of one 
party, but by the consent of all parties ; if you tell mo 
that, although Texas was admitted unconstitutionally, 
and Louisiana obtained unconstitutionally, (so ad- 
mitted by Jefferson himself, v.-lien he made the pur- 
chase,) yet the North has made the act constitu- 
tional b}' tacit consent, b}' the ratification of acqui- 
escence, I answei-, very well ; I grant it, for the sake 
of the argument ; bxit then, what follows ? Why, 
that we are not living under the Constitution our 
fathers made in 1787 to 1789 ; that we are not living 
under the Constitution which Washington administer- 
ed and Jefferson violated when he bought Louisiana ; 
which, if it had been in force, Polk would have 
trampled under foot w^hen he admitted Texas, in de- 
fiance of the Constitution, which confers the privilege 
of admitting new States upon Congres?, and not u])on 
the Executive. In these various acts to which allu- 
sion has been made, the old Constitution of the fath- 
ers was clearly set aside, and either that Constitution 
is binding now, — and if it is, all those acts are uncon- 
stitutional and void, — or that old Constitution is not 
binding now, bv virtue of the existence of a new one, 
and then it follows, that the obligations incurred by 
the old one do not rest upon us now. I say, in 
strict truth, we are not living under a Constitution 



made in 1787 to '89; that, when the Slave Power 
made demands which the Constitution did not war- 
rant, it virtually proposed a new Constitution, and 
when the North acquiesced in the proposition, it vir- 
tually adopted a new Constitution ; and so we have 
had one Constitution made after another, each, per- 
haps, more ample in its concessions to slavery, in 
certain directions, than the other, but certainly neither 
carrying any obligation which is dependent on the 
original compact. Now, if any body does not 
choose to accede to any of the new terms, of course 
he is not bound to obey the new Constitution. When 
Louisiana was admitted to the Union, the North ac- 
quiesced, and a new Constitution was made. That 
lasted until Missouri asked admission. There was 
nothing in the original Constitution that contemplated 
the admission of territory west of the Mississippi. The 
single fact that the Constitution did not confer the 
power on any department of the government to ad- 
mit new territory is sufficient evidence that such ad- 
mission was not in the contemplation of the people ; 
and who will tell me that the people gave the power 
to do that which they never contemplated doing, and 
gave it without assigning any repository that should 
receive it ? "Who could acquire new territory ? Not 
the Executive, not the Judiciary, not the Legislative — 
not all together. There was no place where that 
power was put, and therefore we may reasonably in- 
er that the people never meant to give the power, 
and it never was conferred. Well, we have a new 
Constitution tendered to us in the proposal to take 
Missouri into the Union ; the North, after some con- 



26 

test, yield the point, and the new Constitution is rat- 
ified ; and we have at least the third Constitution 
since the old Articles of Confederation were adopted. 
Then comes the attempt (overlooking all the out- 
rages of the Slave Power in the mean time) to bring 
Texas into the Union — an attempt which it was then 
believed would have signally failed if it had been 
pursued in a constitutional way, and therefore it was 
consummated in a glaringly unconstitutional way ; 
the North acquiesced, and we had our fourth Consti- 
tution made for us. 

Now, if the South may go on tendering to us new 
Constitutions, here for the sake of getting Louisia- 
na, there to acquire Texas, 3'onder to crowd slavery 
into Kansas, in defiance of the three previous Consti- 
tutions, pray may ice not also make our tender of 
terms for a new compact ? The South has made a 
new Constitution just as often as it has suited her own 
interests. Let us take that precedent, and say to the 
South, * We have the offer of a new Constitution to 
make to j'ou. It shall provide that whenever a man 
shall set his foot upon the soil of a State where sla- 
very is not sanctioned by the local law, he shall be a 
free man ; there shall be no chase after him, there 
shall be no dragging him back from thence ; he shall 
be protected in his rights like any other inhabitant.' If 
the South chooses to acquiesce, there is no harm done. 
We have a right to procure other terms than those of 
the compact. You bargain to build me a house, with 
certain specifications, for a certain sum of money. 
You begin your work, get tired of your bargain, ajid 
come to me with proposed changes of the specifica- 



tions. I acquiesce. You are no longer bound by the 
terms of the first bargain, neither am I, and I have a 
right to say that the price shall be varied. Massa- 
chusetts has a right to take this ground, that there 
shall be no slave catching on her soil ; and if that is 
contrary to the fourth, fifth, tenth or twentieth Con- 
stitution which has been made by claims on one side, 
and acquiesced in on the other, all I have to say is, 
* You may take your choice; accept the terms we pro- 
pose, or refuse to accept them, and then we will no 
longer hold you to the terms of the old bargain, but 
will just stand aloof from all complicity with the 
wickedness you practise.' Kave we not the right to 
do this. And if we have reason to believe that the 
South will acquiesce, what is there for the politician 
to be afraid of, or the office-seeker to tremble at ? 
But if we have reason to believe that the South will 
not acquiesce, what then ? Why, then we meet, dis- 
tinctly set before us, this alternative : either to contin- 
ue in the Union, on condition of participating in the 
atrocious crime of slaveholding and slavery-abetting, 
or shun the crime by withdrawing from the Union, 
(Loud applause.) 

Now, I want to know who is ready to meet that al- 
ternative in any other way than that which we pro- 
XJOse : The excuse which men make continually is, 
that there is no need of participating in slavery because 
we remain in the Union. One man says, * I don't 
leave the Union, because the Constitution is anti-slave- 
ry ' ; another says, * I don't leave the Union, because I 
don't feefl under any obligation to obey the United 
States pro-slavery Constitution where it requires me 



28 

to do wrong, and tlierefore I may stay in the Union, 
and not stain my soul with the blood of the slave.' If 
this is true, then the argument against the measure 
which we jn-opose falls to the ground ; if it is not true, 
then the assumption being alio upon the face of it, 
fails to justify a continuance in the Union ; and we 
leave it to those who cling to the Union to select 
which horn of the dilemma they will hang themselves 
upon, during the present session of the Legislature. 
There is no escaping from one or the other of them. 

I have yet one word more to say, which I think 
worth saying, notwithstanding the length of time I 
have occupied already. I go to the people of Massa- 
chusetts, and I ask them, one by one, if you please, in 
the confidence of social communion bj' the fireside, 
* What do you think of catching runaway slaves r' 
' Think of it ! It is abominable. No man shall be 
taken from my house.' So says one. Says another,' I 
■will help the slave to the utmost of my ability. I never 
mean to permit the recapture of a fugitive, if I can 
help it.* Among the Berkshire hills, in the Hamp- 
sliire valley, along the banks of the Connecticut, in 
the heart of the Commonwealth, down here upon the 
shores of Essex and Pb'mouth and Barnstable, wher- 
ever I go, they tell me, * We don't mean to permit a 
slave to be taken away from our soil again. They got 
away Anthony Burns, because they had the neigh- 
borhood of the Navy Yard, and the cannon and bay- 
onets of the United States marines to help them ; but 
these will not aid them any where else. Let them get 
away from the convenient vicinage of Charlestown 
Navy Yard, and they will try in vain to take any man 
from the soil of Massachusetts.' Now, I am not in- 



20 

quiring whether that proud boast will be verified in 
the day of trial ; that is not essential to the argu- 
ment ; all I have to say is, that in these declarations* 
we learn the settled purpose of the people of Massa- 
chusetts not to permit the capture of runaway slaves* 
They do not mean to do it, let the Constitution be 
what it may. Let Judge Taney or Judge Shaw say 
what he pleases, let Benj. F. Hallett and his brother 
Commissioners do whatever dirty work they find con- 
genial to their souls, and let Benj. E,. Curtis, with 
whatever congeniality there is in him, ratify the work, 
the people of Massachusetts do not mean to let the 
slave be taken back to bondage. (Loud cheers.) 

This, of itself, is a distinct, and, as it seems to me, 
potent argument ; one strong link in the chain by 
which I would bind your consciences and your hearts 
to the deed I ask of you this day. If, I say, the peo- 
ple of Massachusetts, from the hills of Berkshire to the 
sands of Cape Cod, from the borders of the Green 
Mountain State to the line of the Connecticut, do not 
mean to send back the runaway slave, or permit him 
to be sent back ; if they mean to shelter him, to feed 
him, to hide him, and speed him on his way to Can- 
ada, if he cannot be safe here ; in other words, if they 
mean to violate what they acknowledge to be a pro- 
vision of the Constitution ; if they mean to transgress 
what they understand to be the requirements of the 
statute ; if they mean to tread under foot the prece- 
dents of the Supreme Court, and of the inferior Courts, 
then what right have they to lie to the South, and 
to lie to the M'orld, even though that lie should cover 
ten pages of the statute-book with a tissue of cir- 
cumlocutions that darken counsel by words withou 



30 

knowledge ? (Cheers.) What right have they to 
say they will do the thing somehoiv^ which they do not 
mean to do anyhow f — that the only difficulty there 
is, is about the mode, when in the heart of them they 
know the difficulty is about the thing ? Why not be 
honest, manly ? Why not be frank and open ? Why 
not speak out to the world what they cherish in their 
own hearts ? Is it not time to verifj'' the declaration 
of Scripture, * that what is spoken in the ear, shall be 
proclaimed from the house-top'? Is it not time for 
us to get hold here of the two Massachusetts extrem- 
ities of the Underground Railroad, and lift it up into 
daylight ? (Loud applause.) Nay, is it not time to go 
yet a little further than that, and break the connection 
between the Underground liailroad of Massachusetts 
and that of A'ermont or New Hampshire, and estab- 
lish here the terminus, right under the shadow of 
our State House? (Enthusiastic cheering.) Let that 
granite obelisk yonder upon Bunker Hill be the 
boundary which says, ' Hitherto, but no further ! ' 
Nay, rather, only to him who comes along the ocean 
track let this be the terminus, but just as soon as the 
land traveller crosses the line of Connecticut, and the 
air of Massachusetts breathes into the open windows 
of the car, let it be understood the journey is ended. 
(Renewed applause.) 

Is not that the true response to the demands of the 
Slave Power for larger concessions to slavery, when, 
with Chief Justice Taney for her mouthpiece, she asks 
you to permit her to carry — no, not asks you to per- 
mit her, but insolently demands tliat you accede to 
her claim — a claim not included [in the terms of the 
Constitution — to carry her slaves all over the Free 



31 

States, — to Bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall, to every 
place consecrated by the blood of freemen, and sacred 
to the memories of the past — demands the right of car- 
rying slaves wherever she will, and of holding them 
as property wherever they are borne — is not this the 
fit response : « No man shall be recognized as prop- 
erty on the soil of Massachusetts; no man shall be 
taken as property from the soil of Massachusetts ! ' 
The people mean it, the people desire it, the people 
have deliberately purposed it in their heart of hearts, 
and why should they not say so ? That is the avowal 
of each of the parties, and of all, taken singly ; why 
should it not be the avowal of all, speaking collect- 
ively ? Lest the voice of the Commonwealth, express- 
ed through so many organs of speech, should fail to 
reach the ears of the farthest South, why not utter it 
in one grand blast through the speaking trump of your 
Legislature ? Carolina, Florida, Texas, can hear 
that, for they tremble sometimes at even the faint 
whispers it has heretofore uttered. 

But the argument is not complete by this state- 
ment of it ; and so I go back to the starting-point by 
the next statement which I make. I ask all these 
people of Massachusetts who tell me that they do not 
mean to give up a runaway slave, ' Why, do you dare 
disobey a law of the land ? ' You are ' a law-abiding 
people.' I have learned that from your earliest his- 
tory. It is in the very bones' and blood of your An- 
glo-Saxon race to be < a law-abiding people.' A Saxon 
man is only a section of a circle, a fraction of an in- 
teger, and the recognition of the State is essential to 
his completeness, and he acknowledges its authority 
accordingly. He is • a law-abiding ' man. But, some- 



32 

how, you have come into a position here which reveals 
another side of that Saxon character. You are prac- 
tically contemning the law ; doing it secretly, if you 
will, not because you are ashamed to do it openly, but 
because only so can j'ou do it effectively ; you say that 
you do not go about this work of charity and mercy 
and humanit}^ and justice, in the manner one would 
go about robbing hen-roosts and stealing sheep, be- 
cause you think there is any thing germane in it to such 
transactions, but because so only can you make the 
benefit effectual that you desire to confer. Very 
good ; then comes my question — * Law-abiding as you 
are, — constitutionally, traditionally, educationally, 
habitually law-abiding as you are, why do you now 
break away from the ties which constitution and tradi- 
tion and education and habit have imposed upon you, 
and tread the law under your feet, break away from the 
constitutional requirements, and give liberty to him 
whom law and Constitution have branded as a chattel 
and property ? ' There is but just one answer you can 
make ; there is but just one answer which measures 
itself adequately with the terms of the question, and 
that is — Conscience — God ! You know it as well as 
I. * God and Conscience will not let us do otherwise. 
We are not law-abiding, because we are law-abiding. 
"We are not abiding by the lower law, because we are 
cognizant of the higher.' (Applause.) 

There, then, I leave j'ou, where I began. I began 
by showing you that this comijact is n< t binding by 
reason of its immorality ; I conclude by showing you 
that you feel it not to be binding by reason of your 
consciousness of its immorality. 



54 








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